


all the plans we wrote on paper

by thisstableground



Series: maps [2]
Category: Do No Harm (TV)
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Recreational Drug Use, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-09
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-10-16 20:40:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10579092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisstableground/pseuds/thisstableground
Summary: Companion pieces set in the same verse as 'maps wont show us where we're going', updated whenever inspiration hits. You'll need to read that first to know what's going on.1. beach day2. post-rave





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> [a/n: i didn't want to leave Ruben behind just yet and was stuck for ideas, so sherlockianeliza on tumblr suggested Ruben relaxing on the beach with Tariq. this is that fic, orig posted on tumblr. set about two months after the end of maps. it is the sappiest thing i will ever write, probably, Letting Ruben Be Happy for reals this time.]

Ruben’s taken to visiting Cleo and baby Tariq every Thursday on the regular now, so it’s a bit of a surprise when she yanks her door open looking more like she’s expecting to get into a fistfight with Death. Her dreads are falling down from the poorly-tied bandana keeping them off her face, her jaw is clenched so tight it looks painful, and everything about her screams _just fucking nope_.  
  
Ruben takes a tiny step backwards. “Uh, never mind, we can reschedule?”  
  
Cleo doesn’t exactly soften so much as make a monumental effort to force herself softer, but the effort is still appreciated. “Do I look that bad?”  
  
“Pretty much,” Ruben says cheerfully. She gives him a _very_ expressive gesture then stands aside to let him in her room. Usually, it’s bright and clean in here, Cleo doing her best to make the small shared space a good home for her and Tariq. Right now there’s mugs and plates in the tiny washbasin, toys and baby clothes strewn on the floor, and the whole room is only dimly lit since the thin curtains are still pulled across the windows. Tariq is griping unhappily in the corner.

“Bad day?”  
  
“Headache,” she admits. “Well, everything-ache, but the head is the worst part. And my charming child here woke me up at six this morning by-“  
  
Tariq takes this moment to pull himself up by the railing of his crib and make a noise somewhere between ‘siren’ and ‘unhappy sheep’. It’s both piercing and incredibly loud. Ruben winces sympathetically.  
  
“Yes, that.” Cleo turns to him, wild around the eyes. “What _is_ that? _Why_ is that?” She puts a hand over her eyes, only half-melodramatic.  
  
“Oh, hey, you should sit down. Have you taken anything for it yet?”  
  
“Paracetamol, not that it helped much. I can have more in about half an hour.”  
  
“Have you got ibuprofen too? Yeah? Take that instead, then paracetamol again in four hours if you still need it. Don’t have the ibuprofen on an empty stomach, though, just something bland like crackers if you aren’t feeling hungry. Maybe a little caffeine if you’ve not had any today, but don’t overdo it. Woah, what’s wrong?”  
  
Cleo’s eyes have filled with tears. She swipes them away frustratedly. “Sorry. Sorry, nothing’s wrong at all, you’re just being so _nice_ and I’m just so tired. And Tariq’s been restless all day. I know he’s bored but I can’t play properly or take him out anywhere, not when I feel like this. I really could have done with sleeping in today, just this once.”

Oh, hell, this is why Ruben’s ambitions were always the lab instead of the hospital floor: he’s got no sort of way with other people’s emotions. Help is easier to give when it’s all practical. Even when his mom used to get stress migraines - he must remember to ask how she’s been coping when he next calls, whether his sisters made sure to look after her during those months they thought he was dead - Ruben was never much good at comforting her with words. A cup of green tea, locating the painkillers, keeping his sisters quiet and out of the way, that was more his thing.

 _Single parenting without siblings to keep everyone distracted must be_ ** _hell_** _,_ he thinks, and barely even notices himself saying “I could always take Tariq for a few hours” until Cleo is staring up at him.  
  
“You’d really be okay with that?”  
  
Shit, well, not really, he’s already realised that this is an awful idea, but Cleo looks so surprised and hopeful that he can’t exactly back out now. “Sure. We’ll go to the beach or something.”  
  
“Ruben, you are an _angel_.” She stands and moves as if to hug him before catching herself. “I’ll just gather his things-“

She’s shoving supplies into a bag and talking cheerfully enough, but her face is tight in a way Ruben can feel deeply. An echo of too many sleepless nights squinting at a screen in the lab, too many sleepless nights in the hotel staring at his door in wide-eyed watchfulness. 

“-and he’s got some snacks in there but he’s already had proper food so those are really just in case he gets too fussy or if his teeth start to bother him, and -“

“Cleo. Sit _down,”_ he soothes. “I got this, I know what I’m doing. I looked after my sisters a million times as a kid.”

She gives him a curious look. “You have sisters?”

“Mmhm.” He takes the bag from her and picks up Tariq, who is currently making happy sounds at the attention.  
  
“I didn’t know that. Sorry. It’s just…” she bites her lip, looking unhappy. “I never really leave him with anyone, it’s always just the two of us. I’m all he has and here I am saying I need to take a break. From my own child. That’s terrible, right?”

“Everyone needs a break at some point. You sleep. I’ll take good care of him, I promise.”

She laughs, a little tearfully. “I know _that_ , you idiot. Go on then,” and here she points sternly at Tariq, who grabs at her finger. “And you, don’t you go causing trouble for Ruben, he gets into enough of that on his own.”

“We’ll be fine,” Ruben says, adjusting his grip more securely on the baby.  
  
He’s shut the door and made it halfway down the corridor before he thinks _this is a tiny breakable human life which is entirely dependent on my ability to not fuck up over the next few hours_ and his brain starts crying.  
  
Tariq, who has apparently just realised that his mama is not going to be joining their fun day out, does the same thing.  
  
“Ma-ma-ma-ma!” he wails.

“ _Tell_ me about it,” says Ruben, fervently.  
  
***

Tariq is only snuffling quietly by the time they get onto the beach, Ruben finding a quiet spot some way down from all the fishing boats. It’s late afternoon, still glowing with the residual warmth of the midday temperature peak. Ruben toes off his shoes and socks and wiggles so that the soft golden sand slides to half-cover his bare feet like a trickling waterfall of heat.

Now what?  
  
“So…” he says to the baby, who responds by grabbing a handful of Ruben’s shirt and shoving it into his mouth. Ruben sighs. “How is it that you’re trying to eat me alive and I’m still the one feeling socially awkward here?”

“Bleh,” says Tariq, muffled by fabric.  
  
“Yeah, you’re probably right. Okay. Responsible grown up mode activated, step one: don’t put the baby in direct sunlight without a protective covering.” He kicks a little divot in the sand to help keep Tariq upright, wedges him into it and sits down to shuffle through the bag. Tariq scrunches his hands in the sand in wonder. “Don’t eat any of that, please. Aha!”  
  
Ruben locates the floppy little sunhat and places it experimentally on top of Tariq’s bouncing shock of curls. It falls straight off again. “Hmm. Do you even need a hat? You’re more hair than baby.”

But he’s not gonna risk having to go back to Cleo and say _you trusted me with the most precious thing in your life and look, I gave him sunstroke!_  He flattens Tariq’s hair as best he can and sticks the hat on then gently sways Tariq from side to side to test it out. It stays put.  
  
“Look at that! Initial research was a resounding success. We can now move on to more robust trials,” he says.  
  
Tariq reaches up to pull the hat off and fling it to the floor

***

For all that he was worrying earlier, he’d forgotten how much of childcare can be trusted to autopilot. Like looking after the lab rats.  
  
_Don’t compare the human to a lab rat_ , he scolds himself, _you know people don’t like that_. But it’s true: temperature control, food intake, water, mood. Stabilise environment, monitor for change. He periodically distributes sippy cups and snacks when needed, holds Tariq round the waist to help him toddle on the uneven ground with his unsteady legs. They take regular breaks from the sun to drink water in the shade of the thatched-hut cafes dotted around at regular intervals along the seafront, waving at people they recognise.  
  
He rolls his sleeves up when they’re on the beach proper. It’s hot, and nobody but the baby is near enough to see, and Tariq’s far too busy to worry about what Ruben’s arms look like. They are sitting in the damp sand along the shoreline, patting piles of it into mounds. Ruben calls it _magnificent architecture_ and Tariq works with his round little face all wrinkled with concentration like that’s actually what they’re making.

It’s quiet. It’s safe. It’s a day’s worth of something people dedicate their whole lives to. 

Jason has a kid. Jason and Ian are intruders in Ruben’s mind more often than he wants, connected in unknown ways to a thousand mundane activities. It’s not any more welcome now than it ever is. But, Jason has a kid, and it was those words that had ensnared Ruben yet again when he thought he might be close to quitting.

_I have a son. Olivia won’t let me see him again, not while Ian’s around._

He didn’t do it for Jason, not really. He’s tried to imagine, especially back in those first three months before things were a little safer, before he had the lifeline of a long-distance phone connection to America, what it would be like to know your child is out in the world but that you’ll never get to be with them.

It was always too far from his limited experience to really grasp. All he could really think of was fuzzy memories of childhood transitions: from the haven safe from nightmares tucked between both parents, to never knowing whether to head for his parent’s bedroom or the futon in the study where his dad suddenly seemed to live (he always chose the bedroom). From visits and trips every other weekend after his dad moved out, to pressing his face hopefully against the front window and saying “maybe today?” whenever he failed to show up again.

“Maybe,” his mom would always say with a fragile smile, and sometimes things worked out. But eventually Ruben’s dad stopped showing up all together and Ruben stopped waiting for him. His sisters, still too young to understand, would still sit on the sill of the bay window on Saturday mornings and say “maybe today?” and Ruben, ten years old and feeling so worldly-wise, would say “maybe”, knowing that eventually they’d grow up to realise that the answer was always no.

It wasn’t Jason yearning to be a father that he thought of when he threw his lot in with the whole fiasco one last time. It was the idea of some random little kid Ruben would never meet, never knowing that his dad didn’t have a _choice_ but to leave his life, wondering what might make him come back. Like Ruben, like Tariq.

Kid probably would’ve been better off, to be honest. Look at where a close relationship with Jason landed Ruben, after all. But Jason’s stable in his own body for now, the second surgery and revised version of the switch working flawlessly. He’s been sending Ruben emails that Ruben reads in an internet cafe, sipping at bitter black coffee with a pinch of cinnamon. At first they were updates about the operation, the recovery, all sorts of test results that Ruben writes down in case they’re ever needed in the future. Now that he’s settled, Jason still writes, just one or two short paragraphs a week about the hospital, the city, about nothing in particular. One time only, he sent along a picture of a young boy with familiar ice-blue eyes, though he mentioned nothing about the photo in the email. He always asks how things are going with Ruben.

Ruben replies to all of his messages with the same thing:  
  
_Jason,_  
_Thanks for the update. Keep me posted._  
 _Ruben._

Jason had a kid, and now it seems like Jason is a dad. Ruben’s mother never mentioned whether his own father got in touch, when Ruben was being prematurely eulogised across front page news for weeks. 

Does Ruben have a life to dedicate to a kid of his own one day? He didn’t for for a long time. His life belonged to Jason first, then to Ian, then after it happened, his life was a limbo waiting for him to catch on to the fact that he was dead, he was dying, he was ready to die.  
  
Alive now, there’s only his own failings to hold him back. What kind of dad is just as likely to wake the kid up crying in the middle of the night as the other way round? What kind of dad can’t even keep himself safe, never mind his kid?  
  
_No_ , he tells himself, firmly. He’s been trying to do better than that recently. _You won, you told him, you told **both** of them, remember? You didn’t let them take anything else away from you. You got out_.  
  
It still helps, even when it feels like a lie. Some day he hopes he’ll believe it properly. Today, he has more important things to focus on. Like Tariq, doing his best to crawl off straight into the ocean the second Ruben’s attention drifted.  
  
“I think _not_ ,” he says, intercepting Tariq’s efforts and swinging him into the air before settling him on his hip. Tariq shrieks with delight, and pats his gritty hands on Ruben’s face. “Aw, man. One day you’re gonna realise how difficult it is to get sand out of a beard and owe me so many apologies.”  
  
“Beh-beh-beh,” says Tariq, trying his best to drop backwards out of Ruben’s arms.  
  
“You’re right, I can’t stay mad at you. Where are you headed, off to sea? Can I come?”  
  
“Aaa-bl-bl-bl.”  
  
“Cool. Hold up a second.” He puts the baby down and rolls his pant legs up, attempting to keep Tariq somewhat within reach by herding him around in a circle with one foot whenever he tries to crawl off. “Alright! Let’s go show those waves who’s boss.”

They stay in the shallows, where the water is just thin washes of white foam. Tariq stomps his feet and lets out a constant stream of excitable, high pitched warbling at every splash, while Ruben holds his weight up with a hand underneath each tiny, chubby arm, breathing in the seaweed scent of the air.  
  
A memory, more fleeting than a blink: Ruben young and tiny on a Puerto Rico beach, with saltwatered skin drying and crystalled in the cooling evening, the welcome tiredness after a day under the sun, sugar syrup and ice sweet on his tongue. They moved to America when he was four. It might not even be a real memory, just something fallen together from old photos and his mama’s stories about his early years.

Tariq makes an effort to sit down heavily in the water. Ruben picks him up instead and he lays his head against Ruben’s shoulder, damply chewing on one fist.

“Tired, buddy?” He doesn’t have a watch or a phone any more to check how long they’ve been there, but from the sky its getting later, casting the world in the softening gold that hangs around just before twilight. It’s been a few hours, but they’ve been taking regular breaks from the sun and staying hydrated, so it seems safe enough to give Cleo some more time to herself. Ruben wants to hold onto the day for a little bit longer. He settles back in the sand with Tariq, now blinking sleepily, lying froglike on his chest.

This is where Ruben slept, the first week he came here before he had a place to stay. He comes back to the beach alone sometimes, in those masochistic fits where he wants to remember the itch under his bandages and the sharpness of his grief in the days before it faded into quiet aching. Sometimes it’s easier to deal with: back then it was like he never left the warehouse, a constant slicing hurt. Now it’s the long, slow weariness of a lingering disease. Now sometimes it fades to almost nothing and he doesn’t know how to be without it.

He’s getting better, though. He’s getting somewhere, and doesn’t need to fall into a memory of a knife wound quite as often. Today, he has other things to focus on: like Tariq, dozing quietly on his chest, like the corners of the bright blue sky above them suffused with a creeping pink tint of sunset.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [a/n: more ruben fic! at the suggestion of ‘happy ruben in the spring’ from @maeflowerpetunia on tumblr.
> 
> prequel to maps, set during the episode where Ruben gets high off his own supply at a rave with Ian.  
> warnings: recreational drug use, slight mention of violence]

In the cool air of the morning before the day’s pollution asserts sensory dominance, it’s easier to taste spring in the air: blossom and nearly-rain even through the night before still lingering on his tongue and in his throat like the clinging particles of a soluble painkiller, bitterly medicinal and coated. It’s nearly day.   
  
The sunrise will take the nighttime taste away, maybe. Sunrise, morning, Spring! New life, new day, new new new. New drug, kill drugs or pills. A brand new Ruben in his white coat later, on a wicked comedown trying to fit pieces of a neurological puzzle together with molly-addled hands because he can’t catch a goddamn _break_ even though it is Spring, the very time of year which breaks are _named after_. But thats not for a while still: dawn hasn’t caught a break yet either. 

  
It’s still the night before, and the night before left a flavor in his mouth that no amount of water could wash down even though he tried. He’d been drinking water all night, losing hydration like tides sweating through his clothes, replenishing with cupped hands under a faucet.

Ruben was the one who insisted they go to the burger place afterwards.  
  
“Hypona _tre_ mia, Ian, anything’s a poison if you have too much of it, even water. My electrolytes will be all wrong. I need balance! And fries, I need fries, can I get fries? Imagine drowning in nothing but your own body.”

“You worry too much, Rubes,” Ian had said, like they were two normal dudes out for a casual 5AM meal and hadn’t taken a detour through an unopened window to get there. He paid for Ruben’s food.

“Just tryin’ not to die.”

Ian looked deep at him. “Aren’t we all?”

Philadelphia in the spring wears a coating of cherry blossom petals. He tugs a handful off a low branch to let fall from his hand like snow, watching little white circles flutter and glow in the artificial street lights. He probably should’ve stayed home after Ian took him back but even though he was ready to be alone, he wasn’t ready to sleep. At least he left the backpack at his place, so he’s not fifteen grand walking with a bright pink target painted on him any more. Oz the murderous drug dealer was enough times on the wrong end of a knife for Ruben, thanks.

“Check one-two-three, it’s kinda dangerous to be an em-cee-e-e,” he sings tuneless to himself.

Ian drove him home and walked him right to the door like the tail end of the world’s most fucked up first date. Thank god he didn’t lean in for a goodnight kiss because Ian looks like he’d tear Rubens’ throat out with his teeth, or maybe just try and absorb his life force out of his mouth like a Dementor.

Jason looks like he kisses with such an abundance of heterosexuality that Ruben mostly just doesn’t bother looking in that way any more although damn, Ruben can’t deny Jason is still hot. And it’s been a while. Tonight with a pretty girl in his lap - her name, her name? Charity? Destiny? - that was the furthest he’s got with anyone for god, who knows how long. 

It’s hard for him notice how much he misses people sometimes. Get him focused and he forgets to eat and forgets to sleep and forgets that humans are social creatures who thrive on touch. He gets all electric from his work and it can feel like adding anything else would be a circuit overload of too much feeling for one kind of small guy.

Like tonight when he was a plasma ball crackling bright colorful energy towards a thousand points of contact.  It was so hot at the party, a sweaty grinding human-generated warmth. These days he rarely goes outside the lab and a rave was so much life to be suddenly surrounded by. It was a little like giving himself away to become a crowd, one tiny part of the kind of unity that seemed cosmic and primal and transcendent at the time but now with his buzz dying to jitters, seems too much like losing himself altogether. 

Right now in the street at 6am, this is what he wants: spring is outside in the form of soft breezes and he takes his sweater off to feel it on his arms. He wants to go to the river and swim, submerged in cool currents. A sensible part of his brain tells him that’s a bad shout. Too much water in a river, it’ll put his electrolytes out of whack again.

Something’s off about that logic but Ruben can’t focus on that right now because his teeth are itchy. He bites down hard on nothing to try and reach the sensation. He’s been doing it all night, and his jaw hurts, but that’s okay, it’s just the serotonin. 

He swings himself around a streetlamp like he’s Gene Kelly. Who needs rivers, who needs Jason, who needs drugs? Ruben has his brains and a backpack full of cash. Tomorrow, Ruben will be reborn into the lab again like a culture in a petri dish, but that doesn’t have to be forever. Philly springtime is a new weather every day, and even though its been sunny this week Ruben can feel the rain waiting. Montego Bay calls out to him, the promise of Jamaican summertime. Ruben can feel the change on the wind. Soon, soon, soon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [a/n: oh honey you have no idea what's coming and im really sorry]

**Author's Note:**

> [a/n: come inspire me to write more soft ruben feelings at [thisstableground](https://thisstableground.tumblr.com/) on tumblr


End file.
